Lenovo P70 System Benchmarks
We already know that this system is almost specifically made to tackle the hard tasks of creation, thus it’s a very well balanced machine. It’s presumably fast with the mobile Xeon E3-1505M, has a great screen and has a great professional-grade Maxwell GPU with specifications that are quite similar to the GTX 970M. All of the specifications make for what could be a very good combination. But let’s delve deeply and see if the results meet our expectations.
In this case, the EON17-X has a desktop i7-6700K running at a full 4GHz, which is why it has such an advantage, and will throughout most of the tests here. The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 is actually doing very well, especially considering the Xeon inside is actually slower than the i7-6700HQ in the Gigabyte P34W v5. It seems that it might be better suited to these types of workloads, then.
Mozilla Kraken again, proves to be an easy thing to accomplish. It’s number 2 only to a desktop-class processor. Not bad all considering.
Cinebench is also showing the advantages of the Xeon. Though it’s clocked lower, with a lower boost, though it seems that it’s marginally faster than the common mobile i7 in the Gigabyte.
The potent CPU seems to be helping once again. Looking at temperature, it seems that it’s also operating at it’s max boost far longer than the Gigabyte did, meaning it’ll end up finishing tasks faster. We’ll look at cooling a bit later, but I strongly suspect that heat may be the issue, though only a small part of it.
Even here we see the Lenovo ThinkPad P70 edge ahead of the competition in what’s likely going to be a very popular and well-used sort of workload. The mobile Xeon E3 is a fast chip, and as we’ll see, a cool one all around. That helps it finish with better results at times as other systems might slightly throttle to hit aggressive temperature profiles.
POVRay is another example of how the Xeon, especially in this chassis, is more effective than the consumer version. The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 is able to keep itself cool enough by virtue of its robust cooling system so that
Moving on, let’s see how fast the I/O systems of the Lenovo ThinkPad P70 happen to be. Being ECC DDR4, it may suffer slightly in both read and write, but it won’t be a terrible decrease in speed. Being a Samsung based M.2 PCIe interface SSD, it’s going to be as fast as you’d expect it to be. Which is ridiculously fast. Let’s take a look.
The SSD is an enterprise-level Samsung SSD that seems to be a bit faster than even we’re used to. It’s fast, both reads and writes are far faster than we expected, edging past the 950 Pro that’s in the OriginPC Eon17-X, even. It’s insanely fast, and likely won’t be the bottleneck in many peoples workloads.
Just as expected, the ECC DDR4 2133MHz RAM is a bit slower overall, though it does exhibit some interestingly quick write speeds that are strangely faster than the Gigabyte P34W v5. In quite a few professional workloads, having ECC RAM will be a major help in ensuring things get completed successfully, and is a big deal to see on laptops. It’s nice to see it doesn’t have a terrible decrease in speed, too.
Now let’s see how the USB and USB 3.1 Type C ports fare.
We’ve been mentioning how the chassis and thus the ability to cool the mighty Xeon inside has likely contributed to somewhat better performance than a faster clocked i7-6700HQ. We’ll take a look at the actual numbers themselves now, showing you just what we mean. To facilitate this test we played Battlefield 4 for an hour to achieve the highest temperatures possible. This represents a more realistic workload that you might actually see in the field. Some CPU only loads are not quite taxing enough, nor are programs such as Furmark realistic. This you’ll see in the real-world.
As we were quick to point out above, the system is more thermally stable combined with a chip that can withstand more heat and isn’t set to throttle as high, either. The massive heatsink they have inside combined with the efficient fan make for a cool operating mobile workstation. In fact, the system itself still felt cool to the touch. Of course, mind the exhaust which is rather toasty, as it should be.
That cooling system is also not necessarily that loud, either. It won’t win any awards when everything is going full blast, but headphones should help to keep any nascent noise at bay. The sound profile is more of a whooshing noise that might be classified as being somewhat pleasant. During normal operation you’ll hardly ever hear it at all.
But what of one of the most important aspects of a mobile workstation? Battery life. Testing was done using PCMark 8’s built-in battery life tests so that they can be repeated by you, our audience, very easily. For the light test, I chose the “Work” preset as it’s the lightest load. For the medium test, I selected the “Creative” preset as it represents a more difficult workload that you might see as a creative professional on the go. All laptops have been re-run with this test, and the results are below.
This is where having a such powerful components can hold back a performance metric. The massive battery is still no match for very powerful internals in the ThinkPad P70. Despite that, there was still a very usable 3.1 hours in a medium workload. To ensure the accuracy, I edited photos for nearly 3 hours total while browsing in Chrome before it decided it wanted to shut down. For every day office work, however? Yeah, it’s not bad at all. In fact, just browsing the web or writing documents will last a good amount of time. Keep the brightness low and it may last a bit longer too.
Enough of that, let’s get on to the gaming results.